Stop blurbs that ‘blackmail’ your readers, urge Booker judges

Publishers criticised for making people feel they are failures for not ‘getting’ intricacies of a new novel

ARE YOU “the voice of a generation”? Is your novel a “masterpiece”? Is it actually “the great American novel”? Then bad luck: you are not on this year’s Man Booker shortlist.

The judges of Britain’s foremost literary prize have rounded on the book blurb, saying they cringed at some of the purple prose attached to this year’s submissions.

The six books vying for the 2017 award are 4321 by Paul Auster, History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Elmet by Fiona Mozley, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders and Autumn by Ali Smith.

Tom Phillips, the artist and member of the Booker judging panel, was asked how they had whittled down the 145 entries to a final shortlist.

“By learning to ignore the blurbs,” he said. “The blurbs were outrageous. There seem to be special people, quite well-known people, who earn their living making those blurbs and saying, ‘This is the most profound book of our generation’, all that kind of thing.”

A fellow judge, writer Colin Thubron, joked that too many books were heralded by their publishers as the “best novel since Tolstoy”. Thubron said: “There are certain blurbs and quotes from authors which do raise your expectations; certain quotes that almost blackmail you into feeling that you’re either intellectually or morally incompetent if you don’t love this book, or you’ve failed if you haven’t understood it – it’s ‘deeply complex’, ‘ambiguous’ – that if you haven’t loved it, you haven’t got the point. These can be pretty annoying.”

Thubron said that one publisher “submitted three or four novels and he’d given the same blurb for each of them”, and he added: “I’m just a little bit surprised that authors aren’t embarrassed…

‘Certain quotes almost blackmail you into feeling that you’re intellectually or morally incompetent’

I would cringe with some of the descriptions.”

The rules were changed in 2014 to expand the list beyond the Commonwealth, and half the novelists on this year’s list are from the US,

The bookmakers installed Lincoln in the Bardo, an account of Abraham Lincoln’s visit to the crypt where his young son was interred, as favourite to win.

The winner will be announced on Oct 17. Baroness Young of Hornsey, the chairman of the judges, said the judging discussions had been “robust” and there had been “no fights – yet”.